that during all this time
Catilina was backed by more powerful men, who--relying on the want
of a legally complete chain of evidence and on the lukewarmness
and cowardice of the majority of the senate, which was but half-
initiated and greedily caught at any pretext for inaction--knew how
to hinder any serious interference with the conspiracy on the part
of the authorities, to procure free departure for the chief
of the insurgents, and even so to manage the declaration of war
and the sending of troops against the insurrection that it was almost
equivalent to the sending of an auxiliary army. While the course
of the events themselves thus testifies that the threads
of the Catilinarian plot reached far higher than Lentulus and Catilina,
it deserves also to be noticed, that at a much later period,
when Caesar had got to the head of the state, he was in the closest
alliance with the only Catilinarian still surviving, Publius Sittius
the leader of the Mauretanian free bands, and that he modified
the law of debt quite in the sense that the proclamations
of Manlius demanded.

All these pieces of evidence speak clearly enough; but, even were
it not so, the desperate position of the democracy in presence
of the military power--which since the Gabinio-Manilian laws assumed
by its side an attitude more threatening than ever--renders it
almost a certainty that, as usually happens in such cases,
it sought a last resource in secret plots and in alliance
with anarchy. The circumstances were very similar to those
of the Cinnan times. While in the east Pompeius occupied a position
nearly such as Sulla then did, Crassus and Caesar sought to raise
over against him a power in Italy like that which Marius and Cinna
had possessed, with the view of employing it if possible better
than they had done. The way to this result lay once more through
terrorism and anarchy, and to pave that way Catilina was certainly
the fitting man. Naturally the more reputable leaders
of the democracy kept themselves as far as possible in the background,
and left to their unclean associates the execution of the unclean
work, the political results of which they hoped afterwards
to appropriate. Still more naturally, when the enterprise had failed,
the partners of higher position applied every effort to conceal
their participation in it. And at a later period, when the former
conspirator had himself become the target of political plots,
the veil was for tha